25 Short Quotations to Make You Think and Smile

There is a tradition of Christmas crackers in the UK. These ‘crackers’ are festive table decorations that look a bit like an extended bow, and make a small explosive sound when tugged competitively from either side.

The winner is the one left with the longest part after the cracker has snapped in two. The prize for winning is usually a small gift, together with a coloured paper hat, and a little witticism or joke.

It’s a variation on the Chinese fortune cookie, though here the small message you unfold aims to be more wise than witty.

I have collected quotations and written down passages from books in my own notebooks for as long as I can remember.

I type them up and regularly re-read them for inspiration.

Last year I offered a list of my favourite paragraphs. As a companion piece, and in the spirit of the Christmas cracker and Chinese fortune cookie, there follows a selection of twenty-five very short quotations – a mixture of wise and witty sentences, alphabetized by author, and distilled into one or two lines.  

I hope you enjoy them.

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Only educated people can have an inner life.

Hannah Arendt

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To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

Elizabeth Bowen

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I have never heard of any man forgetting where he has hidden his money.

Cicero

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If things were simple, word would have gotten round.

Jacques Derrida

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We don’t know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks.

Albert Einstein

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Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz

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Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

Harold Evans

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If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Henry Ford

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The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind…If you change your mind, you can change your life.

William James

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It’s ugly, but is it art?

Randall Jarrell

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The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Stanley Kubrick

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The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living. 

Audrey Lorde

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It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.

Frank Luntz                 

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You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.

Dean Martin

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Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.

Groucho Marx

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Love: without it, life is just ‘doing time’.

Ottessa Moshfegh

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It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance; it is reflection, meditation.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Blaise Pascal              

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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

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Truth is merely a "compliment" we pay to views that we like.

Richard Rorty                                                                                     

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The source of religion is the unwillingness to die.

Miguel de Unamuno

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Modern life is a race between education and catastrophe.

H.G. Wells

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Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde

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To have an actor enter through a door is nothing, but if he enters through a window, then you have a situation.

Billy Wilder

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Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Ludwig Wittgenstein              

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal and CEO